The present invention relates to holders for uniformly shaped articles and more particularly to such holders that will release an individual article in response to reception of another in its place.
Holders, cartons or packs for supporting numbers of uniformly shaped articles typically include a single common access opening where one or more articles can be released simultaneously. This is, at times, too convenient since articles removed are often forgetten and not replaced. A specific example of this is the typical color crayon and the associated storage box. The common folding box top will open to allow the user immediate access to all the exposed crayons in the box. Therefore, several crayons can be removed, either one at a time, or simultaneously. Since only one crayon can be used effectively at a given time, the remaining crayon or crayons are often neglected and may not be returned to the box. Eventually, crayons litter the entire area.
This same problem is true also of other similarly shaped articles and their holders. Examples may be pencils, pens, firearm ammunition, hair curlers or rollers, etc. If the container is not used to keep the articles organized and safely stored, the container itself becomes part of the clutter.
Containers or holders for sequentially releasing individual articles, often from a nested stack therein, are well known. A good example of this type of holder is the paper cup dispenser, where the bottom cup of a stack projects beyond an open end of the dispenser. The bottom cup can be grasped and pulled away from the stack and holder. The cup is then discarded after use. If the cup is to be used again, it would have to be returned to the top of the stack within the holder.
A holder similar in function to the cup dispenser configuration is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 516,967 granted Mar. 20, 1894 to G. B. Dudley. Dudley shows a stack of shotgun cartridges within a holder having spring fingers at the bottom end for releasably supporting the stack. The bottom cartridge can be removed by pulling it downwardly from engagement with the spring fingers. Only the bottom cartridge of the stack is accessible with this arrangement, just as only the bottom cup of a cup dispenser is accessible.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,804,293 discloses a pencil box for storing a sharp pencil and for ejecting the sharp pencil in response to insertion of a dull pencil. The dull pencil and sharp pencils are held in adjacent chambers. A sliding plate projects across both chambers and is urged toward one end of the box. A dull pencil is used to push against the plate, moving it toward the opposite box end. The opposite side of the plate, in turn, pushes a sharp pencil from the box. There is no direct engagement between one pencil and the other, nor does the dull pencil displace the sharp pencil within the same chamber. Once the dull pencil has been inserted, special measures must be taken before it can be removed for resharpening.
The present invention is distinguishable over the above apparatus both physically and by nature of its function. The present holder is intended to hold a plurality of articles in individual storage chambers. Each article can be removed without affecting the others and is automatically replaced by the article that manually displaces it from the holder. In this way, only a single article is freed for use at any one time, since the previously used article must be restored to the holder before a different article is released. There is therefore less chance that the holder and articles will become separated and lost, or that the articles will be found cluttering an area with the holder itself adding to the clutter.
It is a primary object of the present invention to provide a holder wherein release of any one selected stored article can be effected by displacement thereof with a manually inserted similar article.
It is also an object to provide such a holder that can be easily adapted to releasably support a wide variety of uniformly shaped articles. For example, variations of the present holder can be made to releasably support groups of pencils, pens, markers, hair rollers, firearm cartridges, film packs, etc. The only requirement is that all articles of the group must be of uniform shape.